


dragged out

by bodysnatch3r



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 22:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12022581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: Steven slips away from her with the ease of a cold summer stream. Roland drinks the blood that raised his father too, becomes more hawk than man, more beast than flesh of God. And Marten? Marten finds her at the bottom of the well, and Marten pushes her head beneath the water.She finds that letting herself die, then, is perhaps the greatest act of courage she could gift herself.Or, the last days of Gabrielle Deschain, and the madness between them.Trigger Warnings:Severe abuse (both physical and emotional), suicidal ideation, murder, coercion, sexual assault, manipulation, forced stillbirth.





	dragged out

**Author's Note:**

> A quick note: the flashbacks are not in chronological order.

_ I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed _ __  
_ And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. _ _  
_ __ (I think I made you up inside my head.)

* * *

 

**NOW.**

The carriage rattles like bones. The carriage rattles like bones. She listens to it and doesn’t hear it. She listens to it and it sinks its teeth into her hands. Gabrielle Deschain leans back, tight in her shawl, and doesn’t want to look out the window. His teeth chatter in her ear.

He titters, when he laughs. It’s enough to make the nausea climb with feet and hands sunk deep in the walls of her belly and sing desperation and destruction in her throat. She closes her eyes when she recognizes the apple trees that frame the main road leading up, up, up into High Town, up into a heaven that reeks.  _ the feast i ate was rotten _ . She closes her eyes even tighter, and swallows the nausea down.

_ Stop the carriage. Turn it back. Go back go away don’t come-- _

_ Home? _

_ I have no home. What home is there with ghosts? _

Gilead will not be kind to her. Gilead has not been kind to her for years, and years, and years now. Three years. One of madness, two of insanity.

The wheels turn against the cold muddied road. She cares not for the screaming they make in her skull. Her hands in her lap and they’re clutching each other. Fuller fingers than when she left, no more just bone. No more just nightmare, she has to remind herself. No more the entrapped madness of a girl who’s drowning.

She isn’t scared. She’s too mad to be scared, to furiously insane to be scared anymore of the darkness that’s been stuffed down her throat. She knows that darkness well, now. She’s made it hers. She’s turned it home, because Debaria will never be home (too clean too pure for a girl like her) and Gilead’s sense of home was gutted and eviscerated in front of her, piece by piece, over the course of three years or perhaps four. She lost the child the year before, after all, and Steven perhaps then had slipped away with it. Or before. Or after. Or maybe he was always gone, and both of them didn’t want to notice it.

_ I noticed it. I did. I asked. I begged. _

_ Only silence.  _

Perhaps that should scare her more than the rest of it all. Her eyes are empty, now. They used to be, perhaps, of the colour of a raven’s wings. Now ravens terrify her, and the colour has slipped into dullness and embers long turned low. Perhaps the lack of love should scare her, but she is balanced quite simply between two thoughts, and one is  _ I deserve no love _ and one is  _ I have no love inside me _ .

Not anymore. Perhaps she should be afraid.

Perhaps she’s gone too mad to know.

There is no love for her left in Gilead. Even the boy she’s given her blood for, her womb and her hands and her laughter and soft cradle-songs, even that love’s been taken. Her hands bled from the strength that she clung to it. Her hands bled and still it wasn’t enough. She has scars in the ridges beneath her palms, in the space between skin and blood, and they are thick, and she sees them every time she closes her eyes

_ and see every goodness every kindness every loving thought poured out of him _

and they will always be there, and he will always fester. She closes her eyes.

She smiles, like a gutted animal still trying to breathe past the knife in its windpipe that’s travelling down towards its stomach.

* * *

**THEN.**

The sunlight that drips slowly steady from the cracks in the curtains, pulled tight and taut above her head. She is dozing. It has been three days. Beside her, Roland reads softly. He is nine, her blue-eyed boy, and his sister would have been almost a decade younger than him. Gabrielle is seven years older than Bastien, anyway, and Steven is the only one born from Henry and Deirdre to carry the name of Deschain. She considers moving. She considers eating. She considers all of these things and then considers, much louder, the empty in her chest that drowns her.

Roland’s voice is a slow, low drone. He is reading poetry, of this she is somewhat aware, and he is taking care not to speak too loudly, not to bother her. Kind boy. Quiet boy.  _ Gabby _ , they call him, and it said with a smile and a teasing, loving touch. She does not have an ounce of laughter in herself today. She barely has the space to breathe. Gabrielle swallows, closes her eyes, hopes for silence or perhaps just death. She says nothing. Roland continues reading. Cramps devour her, and she curls up on herself, lying on her side. The pain breaks her and stitches her together again, forever again, and every second her body clutches itself with the newfound absence inside her, she feels her hands shaking. She hears Roland stop reading, doubtful. He will return to the barracks in an hour, the two hours Cort has granted him out of revolting mercy Gabrielle knows he will make him pay every moment he is on the training dust. Roland presses a small, kind hand to her shoulder and it makes her want to weep and tear herself apart.

_ Broken body. Useless body. Childless body _ . She whines, places on her son’s shoulders the burden of having to cure the empty, absent the father, and the son does not want to or cannot feel able to or perhaps is just confused, lost,  _ forgotten _ . Wretched mother, worthless wife. The words have  found a square safe place between her eyes. 

“Please continue.” she whispers, hoarse, when the silence is making her see shapes that are not there. Shadows beside and beneath her. There is a soft gasp, Roland snatches his breath from the evening sunlight to start reading again, the seconds to find his place on the page. Then his voice is a soft, peaceful drone again. She finds herself clinging to it like a child, like a scared little girl, like a woman whose body’s been emptied of anything. Emptied. Empty. 

She shivers again, unable to exist as a body that isn’t made of suffering. She shivers and curls upon herself and closes her eyes.

There’s footsteps, and voices. She moves so she’s sitting, Roland moving slowly aside to leave her space. He stares at her with her husband’s eyes in her brother’s face. She blinks back the tears where her body begs for stillness, and she closes her eyes for an instant. The footsteps are closer, a voice behind the wood, Marten Broadcloak, “Dinh-sai--” the voice says, “dinh-sai,” and her heart leaps to the rafters. Above. Clings to it with the desperation of its pulse. She’s clutching her own hands. Roland notices. She does not.

Steven Deschain opens the door. Gabrielle feels the heart on the wood be ripped back into her chest, find the breaking point against her jugular, and then she feels it, all of it, all at once, eternal and unending, devastating in the stillness.

Guinevere is dead, and she died before they even could greet her to this Earth. 

Steven’s boots are still stained with the dust of the trail. His gloves are still on, his hat is off his eyes are wide. Wide, so blue, and she is ripped to shreds.

She thinks she says his name. She thinks she says, it, perhaps, somehow. Then the tears come. Hard and desperate, an agony of  pain and anguish and guilt so deep it screams her name and only hers.

He stumbles towards the bed, a man unable to comprehend his own echoing grief, and grabs her by the shoulders, pulls her in, towards his chest. Her face against it, his heart jackhammering a path through his ribs and into her jaw. Grief drags them into each other’s chests. Roland stands on the outside and watches his parents grieve for a heart they never knew.

* * *

**NOW.**

Be be _ kind to your mother be good be _

_ Kind  _

_ To yo _

_ Ur _

_ Mother _

Only he’d stared at her, dead-eyed, and there had been no kindness caught between her son’s teeth and no kindness in his father’s eyes, just the words hollow words of a man who is trying to bridge the gaps that have festered with bandages and iodine that have long rotted to dust. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that her son has seen in the ball she doesn’t know how desperately he wants to save her, how deeply he  _ needs _ to know he can save her, she doesn’t know, it’s not her place to know.

All she knows is the wizard told her he will kill her. The wizard told her many, many rotten, burning things. The wizard told her she was  _ whore _ she was  _ dead _ she was  _ dust _ . Whore, perhaps, she is, and dust she is, but dead? Not yet. Not yet, not in her eyes that were black and are now dull badly polished, empty things. There’s still a heart inside her, Gan delah. Small spark. Black spark. Rot spark.

Still there, however, still there. There. It’s not strength she holds onto easily. It’s not strength she still knows she has.

Her spoon clinks against the plate as she stirs and stirs her food. It’s soup. It won’t find room in her stomach. Few things find room in her stomach that isn’t the bloating of horror. 

Mad girl, remember? Deranged. She’s deranged. She barely knows who she is or what’s left, can barely remember her breath what it sounds like. Everything is him. Everything is his scent and his teeth and his hands, always the hands unkind hands, and yet he had started so  _ kind to her _ so  _ good to her _ and then it had fallen. Slipped off. She thinks about vomiting. She thinks about dying, not the first time. Deranged deranged deranged, like a laughter she cannot know the symphony of. Gabrielle swallows.

Roland sits on one side. It’s her left. Steven sits at the end of the table, opposite her. Three hearts and a distance she feels they’ve all dug through with burning red hands. She finds she no longer has appetite for the food. She finds that that at least has not changed. Her bones are lighter, now. He’s hurt her too much for her to ever be safely anchored to the dirt anymore, anymore, not anymore.

The less there is of her, the less that he can hurt-- but he’s not here, not anymore, he’s not, he’s not. He’s crawled his way inside her head and he’s breathing there, but outside there will never be blood again, outside he will never make her bleed--

WRONG 

GABBY. I’M 

_ HERE _

GABBY.

She swallows and lowers her spoon. The liquid inside it trembles. Maybe she can tell Roland (Ro’, Ro’, Ro’, darling Ro’) is trying not to look at her. Maybe she can tell. Maybe she can’t, but she doesn’t know anymore. The world slips past her hands much too easily. The way she digs her hands into it all, and screams when it flows out anyway. Holding on is something she knew how to do better in Debaria, where the air was clear and the pain was less sharp even though it was not  _ home _ not home she has told herself that much too much to know it isn’t true.

He found her in Debaria after all. They chased him out and away, but he found her in Debaria after all. Here in Gilead it’s hard again. Here it’s choking again.  _ Here _ \--

Oh, since when has the Deschain estate been so  _ damnably dark _ ? 

Three years. 

Perhaps there was light, once. Perhaps the light even shone.

_ be kind to your mother _

Steven does not even bother the charade. She feels his eyes blue piercing inside her. Gabrielle swallows. She’s cold.

“Excuse me,” she whispers. The chair creaks as she stands, like nails on glass, like bleeding nails and shrapnel and glass down her throat, always her throat,  _ always her throat _

_ I used to love you both _

_ I love one still _

_ I love you still _

Her skirts rustle as she walks away. Her head spins.

STILL HERE GABBY STILL HERE

_ no _

_ no _

_ no  _

WITH YOU GABBY

Shakes her head, closes her eyes, presses the heels of her palms to them. “No,” she whispers softly, and speaking the words makes them solid like light in the dust, “No. No. No.”

“Gabrielle?”

She turns sudden and snapping and Steven-- recoils. Oh, she must look mad. Demented. A mad girl’s eyes. A mad girl’s shaking lips. She looks at the man who raised her son to be cruel, to be ruthless, to be kind in his own terrible exactness, to be Gunslinger, to be hawk’s eye and beak and talon. 

“Are you alright?”

His question most of all, that tears the dagger down her throat, into her sternum. She gapes like a beast, and her lungs start spilling on the floor. Her blood pools beneath the skin inside her mouth.

Her kidneys will be next, and the hand that will slip past her diaphragm to find them will not be kind. She knows it too well. Girls like her know well the hands that will butcher them. Hers have talons, and are deathly pale, and trace magic in the air the way vomit pools itself in her eyes, and her nose, and her tears aren’t tears they’re just nothing.

She used to know how to laugh. She used to.  _ Sunshine _ , Robert Allgood called her  _ Sunshine _ . The Rose of Gilead. The Whore of Gilead.

She used to laugh with the man, even, even him, the man that’s staring at her slightly furrowed brow slightly--

_ Steven, your mustache still trembles a little when you’re concerned _ . Concerned.  _ Concerned _ . The thought makes her think of scoffing. She scoffs. He furrows his brow deeper.

“Yes.” she replies, mechanical. Then she turns around, and walks away.

* * *

**THEN.**

The first searing pain crawls through her past her ankles, along the bones of her knees and finds as its nesting place the spot beneath the bottom of her spine, her belly, round but not as round as it should be – the bah-bo is small, the bah-bo is only five months old. Still it curls her feet. When she looks past the pain towards her feet she sees an all too familiar puddle.

The second contraction rides her and she's an agony curling on itself. Gabrielle inhales sharply and finds that the air cannot go lower than the ending of her throat: beyond that a knot, beyond that an agony, a breathing of bloody teeth, something rotten and burning.

It hurts again, the pain hurts again, curls around her abdomen, drowns her for a moment. She sits down, her legs are trembling. She blinks. She’s sweating. There’s a flavor in her mouth and it’s of copper.

A third contraction. She cries out, this time, bent over with her knuckles pale. Gabrielle closes her eyes with a squeeze and a tremor. She has to remind herself to breathe. Then she moans.

Then her knees give.

* * *

Silent softness, after. After, when the sheets drenched in blood have been moved out and she is allowed to rest with only her pain as company. After. After, in a white haze in a quiet haze. It takes her hours to wake the first time. After that when she does every once in awhile, there’s soft humming and a washcloth rubbing against her face. She wakes and there’s light, again, when the washcloth was there there was darkness. She drowns again. She slips into nothing again and it’s too easy for it to be good.

“Come now,” Laird De Curry whispers under his breath. He hears her whimper, knows she knows, somewhere in the depth of her cavern of a chest she  _ knows _ that the bah-bo was born and then died, and then when she keens he soothes her with more poppy. Her forehead is a sea of sweat.

The doctor cleans his pince-nez glasses by wiping them on his shirt. He moves very little and has Christine, Sai Deschain’s lady in waiting, bring him his meal on a tray. He takes Gabrielle’s pulse every few hours. He thinks of having Roland called from the barracks, and then thinks against it. He waits. He thinks of the child, Guinevere too small to breathe on her own, born and dead much too soon after. Born and dead before her mother could realize she’d been born at all, drowning as she was in her own pain and gasping for breath beneath her own blood. The thud of the door opening behind him. In the hallway, Marten Broadcloak carrying a new basin of warm water, carrying clean towels.

“Go rest, sai doctor. I’ll watch over her.”

Laird swallows hard and seems more tired than he should be. Than he feels himself be.

“Thankee-sai.” he whispers hoarsely. 

“I will call thee if anything happens. I promise.”

“I know.” 

He moves slowly out the door. Marten sits slowly by her bedside. He watches her sleep, traces her neck with eyes torn open enough to bleed their malevolence, safe in the enclave of privacy that is her room, the white sheets clean of blood, her chest a thinness of pain that’s barely even begun. He inspects her for the first time fully aware then of what he has unleashed, and all it took was  _ arbor vitae _ , tree of life, to take the child from her, to unravel Gabrielle Deschain and her idiotic, proud husband. They’d started to burn a while before. Marten figures the child will only speed up the process.

When she opens her eyes for good, they blink in nothingness. She hears voices. She feels a hand behind her neck, to cradle her head. She swallows, hard, her throat dry.

“Easy now, my lady.”

The voice is soft, accented differently than the rest, soft like wings against a windowpane. She will grow to hate it. Now it is comfort and friendship.

“Mar… Marten?”

“Aye.”

She tries to move and is soothed by delicate, lineless hands. One could notice his index and middle fingers, the same length, but those who do dismiss it as a birth defect. They run a knuckle along her cheek, softly, the twisted mimicry of a concerned friend. She emerges from sleep then, fully, the gasping pain that sets its hooks into her throat. From her belly. From her heart that knows a part of it has been destroyed before she does. She clutches Marten’s wrist.

“The child, the child, is it--”

“Hush now, dear.” Marten Broadcloak whispers in that quiet voice of his, and she feels herself grow heavy, heavy, softly so. She closes her eyes again.  _ The child _ , she thinks, delirious, clings to the white thought in the pit of darkness she’s dripping into.  _ The child, the child, is it-- _

_ Hush now, dear _ .

Her sleep is dreamless, the shadow of her absent dreams is made of dust.

* * *

**NOW.**

“Will thee dance with me, Lady Gabrielle?”

She looks up from the braids she was tending to, her hands sleek and perfumed by the oil. Steven Deschain stands behind her, in the door that leads into her chamber from her apartments. He is holding his hat in both hands.

He looks a hundred years old.

_ Then I must look a thousand _ .

“Pardon me?”

“Will thee dance with me, Lady Gabrielle, after our son's ceremony?”

Had this been a year ago, she would have wept at the request. Wept, and wept, and wept, in agony and happiness, at the prospect of having him alone. Of having the chance perhaps to speak, and break the burning of her sternum. Now it is too little, too late, and her eyes linger on his face for the time it takes for her to run her fingers through her hair, slowly and delicately massaging the tightly-braided strands. Now Marten wants her to dance with him and beg for his forgiveness, and slip the knife between his ribs. And if she dances with him, she will ask for forgiveness, and will not know whether it is herself or the beast in her head. She stares at her hands.

Steven still hasn't moved.

“Mayhap.” she answers softly. There is no cruelty in her stiffness. There is all tremble in his own immobility.

“I believe it... it would be well-seen.”

She scoffs. Again, she puzzles him. Again, her eyes are stiff and not cruel, but he is a gunslinger, and he knows she is, if nothing else, she is  _ jaded _ . And it puzzles him.

He should be the jaded one. Not her. She has no  _ right _ to be jaded. No right for anger when she took another man between her legs.

“I am doing you a  _ favor _ .” he says, then. “To be accepted back into  _ my  _ good graces is to be accepted back into the good graces of the court.”

He is not snarling. She knows it is taking him everything inside his own tired hands not to snap at her more than he just has.  _ Whore _ , she spells on the back of her teeth with the tip of her tongue. Her mouth does not move as she does so.

_ Whore. Whore. Unlovable whore _ .

There is a thought to the blade in her drawer. Her agony sometimes now turns to rage, and she thinks:  _ slit his throat _ . She thinks of how Steven had smacked her when he'd come home from Cressia, when he'd found Roland a gunslinger, her alone on her floor weeping with savage joy, Marten gone into the night in a flurry. How fiercely she'd wished to have the strength to tear him to shreds, then.

For a moment, of course. Then it had slipped back into confusion, joy mixed with anger, mixed with worry, mixed with sorrow.

“I did not say no. I said  _ mayhap _ .”

Steven clears his throat.

“I... I would also appreciate it, sai.”

Her eyes, to his face again. There is a speck of the same tenderness that, fourteen years ago, made him stop as they walked through the Deschain home gardens and tuck a daffodil behind her ear. It is still there, and the pain of seeing it makes her rage turn to an ocean, and the ocean swallow her whole.

None of this should have ever  _ happened _ , Steven. Steven. Steven,  _ where were you _ ?

“I will think on it.”

He sighs, and slips his hat back on.

“Do not be late to the ceremony.”

“No, dinh-sai. I will not.”

When he leaves, there's a figure leaning against the wall he was standing in front of. She sees him in the reflection in the mirror the way she saw Steven, distorted ghosts of the men who have controlled her life.  _ Wizard and glass _ . If she turns, she knows, he will not be there. She sees him, and is not surprised.

He leans with his hands crossed behind his back, leans casually, like he was simply listening.

“You know,” Gabrielle says, her voice low, “for a few weeks, in Debaria, I tried to trick myself into believing it was all in my head.”

A chuckle, a rattle. Marten moves a few steps forward. His robes billow behind him.

“Mad girl, did it work?”

“No.”

When she looks up again, he is close enough to rest his hands against her shoulders. His thumb, his sharp long nail, brushes lightly against her throat. She should be in agony. Part of her is. Another part of her, like so often now, has crawled onto the ceiling. Sometimes there is terror. Other times, like right now, she is empty.

“I thought I made you up inside my head.”

“No. What I did to you, what I can still do, was very real.”

She looks him in the eye across the expanse of glass that is reflecting. She says nothing. They are fated, inextricable, butcher and butchered beast. He says his words with a fond cruelty that comes from knowing when a fate is melded to another. If there is tenderness it is the one that a fox has, the pity that it serves the trembling hare the moment before its jaws will sever its carotid.

“I told you not to come to Gilead, Gabrielle.”

“First you tell me  _ do _ , then you tell me  _ don't _ . Come now, Marten o' the Broadcloak. Be  _ decisive _ .”

The spark of rage in his eyes. “Insolent bitch,” but she is hidden safe in the comfort that he is not  _ here _ , not physically, not here and he cannot hurt her.

She feels the sting when her own cheek connects with her palm. One, then another. A third one, hard. It will leave a mark she will cover with makeup, like every other time.

_ I do not even have this left. _

Her breath is ragged. Her eyes close. The empty rage is replaced again with the chasm in her chest she has learned to nurse enough so that most times, at this point, it is nothing but the low lull of a throb.

“Gabrielle. Open your eyes.”

She does because she cannot not. When he sees them wider, glistening, he smiles. His thumb travels up, to her lips. She exhales shakily.

“Strength was never your thing, silly girl. Farson could get the sphere in other ways. You're just a  _ tool _ , and by coming--”

A pause. She sees him glance around the room, and his lips are curled in an incomprehensible smile.

“By coming  _ home _ , you've only made it easier for us. Remember our plan.”

“ _ There is no _ \--”

Her own hand, in her own hair. Not with the tenderness she was giving it earlier. This time it yanks, hard, and pulls her back. She gasps, her jaw tensing and the cry is a cry of pain. She tugs harder.

“Please.  _ It hurts _ .”

His lips are close to her ear. His breathing is ragged, almost angry.

“There. Begging, now. Begging, you've always been  _ marvelously _ good at.”

Her eyes change again: turn to stone for a moment. She finds her fire, in the plane of pain her scalp is now. Another tug. Gabrielle tastes blood in her mouth when she snaps her teeth down onto her tongue.

“There is no plan.”

Marten smiles. He presses his lips to her cheek, a wet sloppy kiss that leads her stomach up into her throat. Her hand in her hair shoves her forward again. She braces herself against the edge of the vanity, and looks up, her eyes wide.

Marten has moved a few steps back again. His eyes are hard, his teeth are bared as he snarls. Sharp teeth. She remembers how they hurt.

“There will never be nothing  _ but _ the words I have planted in your brain, Gabby. Remember that.”

And then, with a rustle of robes, with the whisper of ancient and darker magic than any kind Gabrielle Deschain will ever imagine: he's gone. His reflection slips away, and Gabrielle is once more alone, and her room is once more all quiet.

Nothing else.

No one else.

* * *

**THEN.**

She spends many, many hours staring, standing, pacing. Back and forth and back and forth again, her footsteps echoing across her legs, up, past her knees, into the small of her back and the bottom of her belly, until the sound and the movement become one, and she feels herself become a ghost pressed against the scant walls of her room. Debaria, where it is quiet and her heart has all the space it needs to fill itself with saltwater and anger. Debaria, where the emptiness comes to lay itself to rest, where wounded animals come to lick their bloody scabs. She holds her hands against her heart, her heart in her hands her heart that has been wounded. Gods above, Gods above, Gods flying in the rafters where she’s tied the sheet like a noose. Gods dark. Gods gone, Gods clinging to her bones.

It would be easy. He would be gone. She would be gone. She swallows. It would be  _ over _ oh Gods it would be gone and drowned and dead and wheezing for its last breaths. She closes her eyes.

* * *

It is cold. She wakes, and the castle around her is silent. Silent. There’s something underneath her tongue and she spits it and it’s her agony. She swallows. Her ribs hurt. She closes her eyes, the pillow against her cheek, the body, her body, (her body?)

Her body. It takes her a moment to remember she is attached to the heap of flesh connected to her bones.

Gilead, unforgiving in its harsh dark light. 

When she moves the ache between her legs sharpens, deepens, he was not good, he was not good, he was not gentle he is never gentle, she is not good for having let him have her. The thing she tells herself each night. The single vomited agony. She is beyond any comprehension, she has slipped beyond the living, she has become the shell. She has become the nothing empty. The void. Oh, Todash space is nothing compared to the cavern inside her.

Gabrielle closes her eyes. When she opens them again, Marten is still sleeping beside her. She knows he knows she is awake. Somehow. He knows, he always knows. She does not even own her own pain: he is the sole creator of it. Gabrielle slowly gets up and only grimaces when she moves to walk. She’s scared she’s bled, she’s scared he’s made her bleed, as if it hasn’t happened before, as if it isn’t common, as if she isn’t the beast upon which his horrors must be unloaded. She swallows. Her ribs hurt, her heart beats so slowly she has to stop and make sure she’s not dead.

She is, she has been for some time now, the heart’s just missed the memo, the heart’s just missed the note he carved inside it.

Gabrielle turns. Marten’s pale body traced along by moonlight, his chest and the sheet lying half on his legs, half on his limp cock. She feels a single, endless moment of revulsion. Then the revulsion turns to her body, because that cock was inside her and she allowed it. Then the revulsion turns to nothing. Apathy has become more than anything the way she has learned to exist in this world made of solid unforgiving night. She turns again, passes her vanity with the empty plate of food ( _ good sex always made him hungry _ ). She stares at the window. There’s the moon, hallucinated and large, the face on her screaming. The light of the moon that claws at the sky, bright enough to make it drown away. Clouds. Lightning but she cannot hear the thunder.

Gabrielle opens the window. Marten opens his eyes, sees her silhouette against the glass and then against the light from outside. Her body, naked and thin, as she climbs onto the windowsill. She should, perhaps, be scared of the emptiness. She should, perhaps. Perhaps.

Right now, jumping feels like the sanest thing she’s ever done in a good, long while. She looks down to the snow-covered ground beneath them, a good drop, and sees her body, naked, hitting the ground, the chatter of teeth against tongue, her teeth splitting her tongue, her spine breaking, there, then, the blood pooling in her lungs, the silence, the silence and perhaps the scream of someone finding her lying on the earth too cold too move, and then, and then it would be silence and empty and  _ over _ , it would be over, it would be--

“ _ I have use for you yet _ , whore.”

She is aware first of the pain as she’s yanked back by the hair and then of everything else. Then she is aware of the ground against her shoulders as she trips and falls back.  _ I have use for you yet _ . There are moments of great pain where the mind must find a way to defend itself. As Marten forces her to the floor and forces himself between her legs (use for you use for you use for you) she closes her eyes, she stares at the ceiling past her shoulders. She wishes the moon to take her. She wishes the moon to hold her close.

* * *

The noose around her neck is a tight, snug fit, and she thinks it suits her well, better than any necklace Steven ever bought her.

She kicks the chair aside, and it crashes to the floor a bit too loud.

She’s already passed out by the time Sister Elise finds her, and so she does not hear her call her name. The last thing she sees is a raven on her windowsill. The raven laughs. Then the noose tightens and the oxygen slips out of her luns, and the silence is so beautiful she could weep.

* * *

 

**NOW.**

She discovers that insanity begins more often than not in her hands. They are made of copper, inlaid with ebony, torn down with ivory and silver. And they tremble. Sometimes she looks at them and they are not made of the color of the flesh of a living thing. Sometimes they shake. Sometimes they shake and she thinks  _ hands are shaking _ , not  _ my hands are shaking _ , just hands, just hands attached to wrists that do not feed into her arms. 

She is learning, then, to exist in a space with hands that are not her own. Little of her is hers anymore. Little of her belongs to something that could, perhaps, carry her name. Something that once, perhaps, carried her name. Now there’s no name. Now there’s nothing.

Her hands shake too hard to still them. 

She’s listening, she realizes, for footsteps. The light, devastating footsteps. The footsteps that churn and turn and breathe and crawl crawl crawl, the footsteps of her death that walks and breathes. Her death. Her death, beginning slow, and slick, and burning. Her death, when he would come and have her deep at night, and she would weep. And she would stare at the ceiling and feel her heart fall into her hands. Hands are delicate things. Her husband’s hands have killed more men than she will ever care to know. Her lover’s hands drip with the blood of empires, of worlds, of men who thought they could be stronger than the endless tide of time. He is time. He is death, a necessary horror in a world that’s crumbling. She has learned this the hard way: there is no escaping him.

But Marten left the night Roland passed his proving. Marten left upon darkened, blackened wings, and deceit slid away with him. Marten left, and when he did, she wept in joy so savage it nearly consumed her.

But what footsteps can one hear, at a banquet? 

Maybe it is exactly as she remembers. Maybe it is. But the last years were spent underwater, and maybe it’s not how she remembers it at all. She remembers the golden chandeliers. She remembers the joy of the night, she remembers herself remembering it, then, when the joy had seeped out and there was nothing if not laughter but not with her, and gazes so cold she wanted them to kill her,  _ wished _ for them to kill her. They never killed her. They hardly killed her, and the murderous rage inside them that she wished for was born more from the absence of warmth in sets of eyes that once had called her  _ friend _ (like Louise Allgood’s, Robert Allgood’s, the flickering feverish eyes of Chris Johns) and now, even now, now that she’s back from Debaria, simply call her  _ nothing _ . So there’s a feast. So her son’s a gunslinger, so his father gave him his guns and Steven’s tet-mates looked concerned about the implications. So none of that matters. So she has to be human, so she has to pretend that she’s real, made of flesh and bone, so she has to pretend she still knows what she is.

There’s little left to know since she’s been emptied inside out, since she’s been carved in pieces, since she’s been fed to wolves inside and outside of her, since she’s been made to drown.

Selfish Gabrielle. Selfish Gabrielle, who stares at her hands. Whoring Gabrielle, who broke bonds and broke promises, and broke hearts.

YOU KNOW IT DOESN’T MATTER

_ hush  _

YOU KNOW I’LL ALWAYS DROWN YOU

_ hush  _

YOU KNOW I WAS THE ONE WHO BROKE YOU

_ not broken _

The first drop of blood falls onto her plate. It’s from her finger, a finger she’s bitten without even noticing, and the red drips down from her hand, across a trembling palm. No one notices. She notices only because she sees the blood. There’s no pain, there’s just blood, and how did she  _ how did she not how didn’t she _ \--

The second drop falls too far for it to be still from her. It pitter-patters against the tablecloth. Again, no one notices, no one  _ seems _ to notice, no one’s looking at her, no one has interest in looking at her, why should they? Why should they  _ care _ ?

The third drop falls near Steven’s hand on the table. Robert Allgood says something, Chris Johns laughs his roaring laugh of his. Four more drops, two on her sleeve, one beside Robert, one on the tablecloth. And then more, and then more, and then more. And then more. 

She looks to Roland, who meets her eyes only for a fraction and then looks away with a scowl. His brow is furrowed, and his brow is covered in the steady drizzle of blood that seems to be falling--

From nowhere except the ceiling. And it’s red and it’s red and it’s red.

Some might even say  _ crimson _ . 

The air vomits its way through her. The air surges in cackling agony, and Gabrielle cannot breathe past the blood she is seeing. When she pushes herself away from the table, her hands are shaking.

_ GABBY _ .

_ No. No. None of you _ .

_ NONE OF ME? I AM ALWAYS HERE _ .

_ Breathe, you damned stupid bitch _ her mind snarls at her, _ breathe, you fucking useless whore _ . She keens, hands scraping on her knees, and she feels the Great Hall fall behind her drip away into quietness. There's just the dark hallway, and the flicker of the lights, and the pounding in her head. The blood that wasn't blood but was just madness has slipped away from her line of vision. Now there's just dark marble. Now there's just the coolness of her cheek against the wall. She swallows. Her eyes are closed.

_ GABRIELLE. _

Louder again.

**_GABRIELLE_ ** _. _

Louder, louder, and it drowns her for an instant. Her eyes snap open. The hallway is empty-- if they saw her go, they did not care. If they did not see her go, it will be a while before they notice the empty spot where she was sitting, this farce of normalcy, this  _ nothing's-changed-at-all _ that reeks of rot. (thefeastiatewas--

thefeastiate

rotten)

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT, GABBY. TAKE IT FOR ME GABBY.

“Shut  _ up _ .”

“Shut up? How can I, when I'm in your head?”

She glances behind herself: this wasn't an echo in the rotting mess of her brain, this was near, this was close, this was much too much like – how --

Laughter. His laughter, unmistakeable. That accent of his, that othering lull of soft voices. He was  _ soft _ , and it makes her laugh because if her blood is madness, his softness was poisoned sharp knives. She thinks of the blade she is hiding in her dresser, and the vomit nearly finds her-- nearly finds her. Nearly.  _ Almost _ .

“Get out of my  _ head _ .”

A low chuckle, again, laughter like the dead. When she doesn't dare open her eyes she feels his hands along her cheeks, along her jaw, the back of her neck. If his lips touch her, she will weep. They are close enough to hers that the words are whispered. Close, but not entirely. A small mercy.

She knows well enough by now that small mercies, with him, are only the beginning of agonies the size of the world.

“You carry me inside you, Gabby. Girls like you can never be clean.”

She sinks her nails into her hand, that's how tight her fist is clenched. She opens her eyes. He is there, in the flicker of a shadow against the wall. His eyes are as colorless as ever.

Eyes like the dead. Eyes like a monster. Her head is spinning, softly, lightly like when she would do cartwheels as a child and the world would dance at her ankles as they flew, yapping in its loveliness and tenderness. Oh, the world was tender once beneath her hands. The grass was soft. She knew the sunlight and its warmth. Gabrielle swallows.

His hands, on her cheeks, he tilts her head upwards. His eyes again when she opens hers. His eyes that aren't there.

GET ME THE SPHERE. GET ME THE SPHERE AND KILL HIM.

His voice is in her head again much more than it is outside. She swallows.

_ Girls like you can never be clean _ .

No. No. Never be clean. Never be clean. If she tries to fight him back, he just sinks his teeth into her deeper. Get me the sphere. Get me the. Get it for me. Get  _ it _ , and her swallowing shallow sullied breathing is the shudder of the dead.

Gabrielle looks up from the book she was idly fanning through. Today there have not yet been footsteps in the library that she did not recognize, rarely been the presence of something she wasn’t familiar with.

Not that she has not seen or heard Marten in the library before: perhaps just  _ less _ . Perhaps not as quite as she thought she would.

But she smiles when she sees him approach, all billowing robes and his pale, cold eyes. They soften when they see her, and she swallows a bit too hard for comfort. He picks a roll of parchment from the scaffolding beside her reading nook, and idly skims it. She watches him from the corner of her eye. He stares at the writings. It is a game they play. She finds it agonizing. She finds it comforting. He finds it cumbersome, her pain pathetic. He clears his throat. He smiles without looking at her and knows she is looking well and true. The skin of human creature festooned so easily on these bones of nightmare, and a smile to prove the falseness, so honest, so  _ honest _ . It’s so easy to pretend he feels anything for her that isn’t cruelty, the mad workings of a madder man, the delicate webbing ready to suffocate her. He already thinks of the sounds she will make as she begs. He already thinks of the nightmares his kisses will feed into her skull.

Instead he just smiles. He  _ smiles _ , a perfect mask of perfect kindness and concern. 

“May I offer thee some tea, Mia-sai Gabrielle? In my study?”

“Why not in the gardens?” she asks instead. Over the top of one of the smaller shelves, one of Sai Vannay’s helpers glares at them and shushes them. Gabrielle apologetically bites her lower lip and tries to stifle the mischievous giggle. 

“ _ It is _ a lovely day, after all.”

“That’s why I asked.”

He seems to think for a few moments. His gaze follows the curve of her neck and her jaw. He blinks. He thinks of her whimpering. It sends a jolt through him. Her eyes are so wide as she waits he would almost guess she is the same child who married at sixteen when Steven Deschain was eighteen and already stupid enough to not realize Marten Broadcloak was slowly poisoning his father. But she is a woman, now, of twenty-six, mother of one and none. Of Roland, and Guinevere who died, and then of one other sixteen months after Guinevere who slipped out of her womb before it could barely be considered a child, let alone a coagulation of cells.

Marten took care of it the same way he took care of Guinevere. Marten slipped it in her drink. Marten took it from her, and carved the empty around her, and knew Steven Deschain, as full of love as he is, would not notice, would think things fine, would make things feel the way they should be for himself. His wife who had been starting her path towards drowning for years. His wife he loves and does not know how to show the love to. His wife, his land that burns while he himself is withering away-- not that he knows or knows how to notice. A withering of the core, an infestation of shame soon to blossom. The Fisher King upon the precipice of change, unaware of the leap he must taken.

Marten has played his cards and played them well. He smiles at Gabrielle who smiles right back, and he sets the scroll away. She sets her book back onto the table. He outstretches his arm for her to take.

“Well then. To the garden. I heard the lilies were in bloom.”

When he kisses her that evening, hidden by the cool darkness of her room and by Steven’s absence (the trail holds him to herself in ways nothing else in this world can, the dirt rushing to meet his heart with a silence he knows well how to exchange and find still satisfied and comforting) she feels nothing if not a swirling trepidation. He kisses her gingerly, almost as if he were scared to break her.

When she swallows hard and pushes him away, shaking, he knows he’s caught her in between his hands. His hands know well how to suffocate a dove.

* * *

**NOW.**

When she opens her eyes again, she is in her room. In her room, curtains of heavy damascus, the windows closed to keep the chill out. She opens her eyes, and sees her reflection in the three-paned mirror. It is tainted pink, and the sphere rests on the vanity she sits in front of. She sees it. It slips between her ribs with an agonized, agonized sob.

Gabrielle--  _ Gabrielle _ . Did you expect _ any _ different?

It's her voice. Not his. Her voice, tainted with the sharpness she has learned to wield against herself with cruelty unmatched and unparalleled. A hand to her neck. The markings of the noose have left her, finally. Still, she lets her fingers trail along her throat, and the wood of the burning house of her mind creaks around her.

Whatever he's done to her, she's learned to do it to herself twice as worse.

“Good, Gabrielle. Good. Good.  _ Good _ .”

She looks up from the damnable glass, from the damnable sphere. He is back in his usual hallucinatory spot, back to leaning against the wall, back to walking, sauntering towards her. She stares at him in the mirrored reflection, and her eyes swim with tears. Her eyes swim with hate. He sees it, too, and he laughs.

“You foolish, stupid girl. You idiot dreamer. There you were, thinking you could  _ beat me _ .”

She swallows and says nothing.

“Thinking I hadn't cracked your little head open long, long ago. Thinking I didn't already know every mapping of your heart. Come now.  _ Come _ , Gabrielle. I thought you smarter than that.”

A pause.

His hands are on her neck again. She has still not spoken a single word. Loosely, wrapped around her. She feels the pads of his fingers brush against her skin when she swallows.

“You were always so easy to break.”

“I have gotten you the sphere.  _ Is that not enough _ ?”

“Farson wants him  _ dead _ , Gabrielle.”

She closes her eyes. She closes her eyes, jaw clenching.

Then she turns to see him when he is not there, and the world flips on itself with the ease that comes to all magic made with madness.

The world inside her mirror, where he finds his own doorway to her mind, is not much different than the one on the other side. She knows she's still there, sitting at her vanity with that damnable sphere. She knows she's also here. She's not entirely certain she understands  _ how _ , but she knows it is so.

Marten stands in front of her. His lips are curled in pleasant surprise, his arms crossed against his chest.

“Well. Bravo, Gabrielle. An impressive little trick.”

Another chuckle. It makes her want to tear the tongue from between and behind his teeth.

“ _ Now what _ , Gabby?”

He can smack her, here. And he does. And she falls, like she always did, and he laughs, and she sees the floor past her hands and sees herself past the mirror, immobile at the vanity.

“Now what, Gabrielle?”

He takes joy in this, terrible, horrifying joy, a joy that drinks her pain to the dregs, that dances in the empty, snapped ruins of her ribcage. He buries his hand in her hair.

He can, here.

(istillhaveuseforyoubitch)

He pulls her back, by her hair, she's on her knees, she is breathing hard, in the world of the mirror the darkness spins that much faster inside her. She closes her eyes. She opens them again. She sees herself in the reflection like she's looking through glass, and the ghost of their shapes in it, too. The world outside.

* * *

 

**THEN. // NOW.**

“Roland!  _ Roland _ , wait thee!” she calls out, half-laughing, half yelling his name. Gold. Gold. Gold in her hair, in her eyes, gold against her teeth and that wide smile. Roland, she sees and she blinks past the tears, Marten’s hand tight in her hair, herself across the expanse of her breaking mind,  _ Roland! _ she calls, and laughs so hard. 

Roland is no older than four, before the barracks, before the dirt that made his father into the weapon that he is, Roland who turns and sees his mother with her skirts hiked up.

“Hurry up, Mama!” he says, and turns again. Ringo runs beside him, the reason he is running in the first place, and she laughs. She laughs, the earth inside every inch of her, the sunlight in every inch of her, the sunlight, her son’s blue eyes and the golden grain around them.

The air smells of apples and orchards and roses, faint and distant, powerful like the endless thrum of the world. She sees her boy laugh, thrilled by the simple miracle of a butterfly. She sees her boy and his heart is as wide as the world. She sees her boy and sees every heart he will hold inside himself.

It fills her with so much beauty the vision strikes her still.

* * *

**NOW.**

“No more.” Gabrielle whispers.

Time stills. Marten, who's ready to slam his knee between her shoulders, slightly loosens the grip on her hair.

“Excuse me?”

Her lip is bleeding. She tilts her head, slightly.

“No more.” she says again.

“No more? No more  _ what _ , Gabrielle?”

His knee does come down and in the depth of her stomach she feels her spine creak in pain. She whimpers, and she swallows, and she does not relent.

“No more. No more from you.”

He lets go of her hair. She drags herself to her feet, and she turns to face him once more. He's shaking his head.

“I told you not to come back to Gilead. Gilead that cared little for you, Gilead that'll kill you.”

“I won't kill him, Marten.”

“You will. You took the sphere for me, why won’t you kill him?”

When he hears her laugh, his brow furrows. His eyes narrow. She feels the poison seep through her, drip down her hands, past her blood and her agony. In the darkness, her heart shines golden. In the darkness, her heart shines and shines and shines. There are things not even the cracks in the walls can keep at bay. There is light too bright even for death.

“You will take no more goodness from me. Or him.”

_ see every goodness   _

“You will never know. You will never understand.”

_ i cannot bear to let him go _

“You think that we are all like you. You think that we are selfish, ruthless beasts.”

She laughs with the horror of a girl who knows without a doubt that she will die. She laughs like the girl glad death has finally come for her. She laughs. She laughs. She laughs like the dead, and the mad author of this dying world says that he does too. Perhaps it is this that ultimately bonds them, prey and predator, lover and whore, master and slave, girl and wizard who broke her, wizard and girl who broke him.

He snarls her name. Perhaps it is her name. Perhaps it is a curse. With her it matters little, matters nothing. She takes a step back away from him. She takes a step back and he lunges forward and then finds, resolute and insurmountable like the goodness inside her, that he cannot reach her. It is like there is glass between them. It is like there is barrier. His hands slam against it, once, twice, and she feels her cheeks curl in a smile that’s made of pure madness.

“WHORE!” Marten howls, and as his hands pound the edge between them, she sees his face melt away. The mask that drips off, the horror in his eyes that turn from blue to grey to black to red, Marten whisked away, Walter O’Dim staring back at her with his sharp teeth bared, his hideous snarl, the smoke escaping like plumes from his bared teeth.

“WHORE! STUPID WHORE! YOU’LL DIE, YOU STUPID CUNT! I’LL KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU!”

“I know.” 

She has never been more free to speak two words. Never been more certain of the beauty in her own sovereignty over her destiny. Oh, it is exhilarating -- to be able to  _ choose _ . To live, to die, to sleep, perhance to dream.

“Goodbye, Marten-that-was.”

He howls. There is no humanity left in the maw, blood-red, that he gifts her. Yet he cannot reach her, yet he cannot harm her, yet her death is her decision as is her pain as is the goodness she has chosen to protect.

“HE’LL KILL YOU! YOU SHALL RUIN HIM! RUIN HIM! RUIN HIM! RUIN HIM!”

She leans against the glass because glass it is.  _ Wizard and glass _ . She is braver now, she is freer now, she is happy in her agony, happy in her distraught pain.

“There is goodness in him you will never be able to quench. I have seen it. He has taken it from my wretched blood.”

His roar is a roar she does not care to listen to. When she steps back, when she lets herself fall back, she is in her room again, she is at the vanity again, the sphere is still there.

There is no one in the room, no one except her, no one across from her in the glass. She stares at her own reflection, her cheeks streaked with tears. Iron in herself, a spine made of blood, a spine made of sharpened steel. For the first time in an agony, she can finally see herself for what she is.

Gabrielle sees herself in the mirror, all of her, scars and burning pain, agony behind her gray eyes. Rage and bitterness at her abandonment, at her betrayal, at her mistakes and the mistakes of those around her.

_ More sinned against than sinner _ .

Gabrielle Deschain sees herself and all her broken angles. And she smiles.

* * *

 

_ There is a crack _ __  
_ In everything. _ __  
_ That’s how the light _ _  
_ __ Gets in.

 


End file.
